Trump Says the US Could Leave Iran Right Now. Leaving Would Mean Lifting the Blockade — the First Thing Iran Asked For.

At a campaign rally in Kansas on October 19, Trump told the crowd that the US could leave Iran right now. Someone had said so, he noted, and it was true. Iran, he added, will not have a nuclear weapon.

His case, as reported by Al Jazeera and others:

• Military: Iran’s navy and air force are effectively gone, and its radar and air defenses have been destroyed. He said 229 Iranian fighter jets sit scattered across runways.
• Leadership: The first tier of Iran’s leaders is gone, the second tier is gone, and half of the third. He does not know whom to negotiate with, he said. The leaders who remain have asked for guarantees that they will not be killed like the others.
• History: Qassem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force commander, was killed in his first term — by a US drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020.

He also turned to Iran’s crackdown at home. Iranian authorities have killed at least 75,000 protesters in the past eight months, he said, a figure that has not been independently verified. People ask why Iranians are not protesting, he said; it is hard to protest when there are machine guns at the end of the street. He cited Saleh Mohammadi, a young former world-champion wrestler executed in March. Mohammadi was publicly executed with Mehdi Ghasemi and Saeed Davoudi; Iranian authorities said the three had killed two police officers during nationwide protests.

What Leaving Would Mean

The US presence that shapes the war is not troops in Iran. It is the naval blockade around the Strait of Hormuz, in place since spring, which has held traffic through the strait to about a third of its pre-war volume.

Leaving now would mean lifting it. That is exactly what Iran asked for first. Its seven-day plan, sent through mediators on September 24, called for the US blockade to end before anything else, with Hormuz reopening within seven days and nuclear talks to follow. Trump rejected it on September 26: “I love deals, but what they offered is not acceptable.”

Three weeks later, he is describing the same move as an option he could take any time.

Who Is Left to Talk To

Trump says he does not know whom to negotiate with. On September 27 he told Axios that Iran “wants to make a deal” and that he expected more talks that week.

The rally added one new detail. If the surviving leaders are asking for guarantees of their own safety, that is a term on the table alongside sanctions, frozen assets, and Hormuz — and an unusual one.

The Calendar

The other statements about the war still point past the election:

• No strikes before November 3, Trump said last week.
• The war ends “probably right after the midterms,” he told an Alabama rally on October 2.
• Pickaxe Mountain: In September he named the deep enrichment site as a possible target — “We may have to do it again. There’s another place called Pickaxe Mountain.”

Leaving right now works as a rally line: the war is won, and the troops could come home. But the war’s two stakes — no Iranian bomb, and oil through Hormuz — depend on what the US does next, not on how many jets sit on Iranian runways. Iran’s ability to raise oil prices has not depended on its navy. The September attack that halted Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, and the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia Trump blamed on Iran last week, came after the losses he described. Leaving without terms would follow Iran’s own sequence. Leaving with terms requires the deal Trump has not reached. And if Pickaxe Mountain is still a target, the promise that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon depends on what happens after the US leaves.

The Other Side

If Trump’s description of Iran’s losses is close to accurate, Iran’s conventional threat has been cut deeply, and ending a war from a position of strength is a classic way to close one. The blockade and escort operations are expensive, and Iran has been betting that their cost grows faster than its own. Leaders asking for personal guarantees suggests a government under real pressure, which may be closer to a deal than its public statements imply. And if leaving reopened Hormuz, oil could fall quickly.